Hi, I’m Alex

A Bit of Benchmarking

PyPy recently posted some interesting benchmarks from the computer language shootout, and in my last post about Unladen Swallow I described a patch that would hopefully be landing soon. I decided it would be interesting to benchmarks something with this patch. For this I used James Tauber's Mandelbulb application, at both 100x100 and 200x200. I tested CPython, Unladen Swallow Trunk, Unladen Swallow Trunk with the patch, and a recent PyPy trunk (compiled with the JIT). My results were as follows:

VM

100

200

CPython 2.6.4

17s

64s

Unladen Swallow Trunk

16s

52s

Unladen swallow Trunk + Patch

13s

49s

PyPy Trunk

10s

46s

Interesting results. At 100x100 PyPy smokes everything else, and the patch shows a clear benefit for Unladen. However, at 200x200 both PyPy and the patch show diminishing returns. I'm not clear on why this is, but my guess is that something about the increased size causes a change in the parameters that makes the generated code less efficient for some reason.

It's important to note that Unladen Swallow has been far less focussed on numeric benchmarks than PyPy, instead focusing on more web app concerns (like template languages). I plan to benchmark some of these as time goes on, particularly after PyPy merges their "faster-raise" branch, which I'm told improves PyPy's performance on Django's template language dramatically.

Sorry, no comments here. I'd much rather you wrote your own blog post or sent me an email instead.